Remembering the Holocaust: Visiting concentration camps

This will probably be the most difficult travel writing I do, and the least enjoyable to read, but it is also an important experience on which to reflect, today on Holocaust Remembrance Day and every day. I have visited two concentration camp sites while traveling in Europe: Dachau during my trip to Munich, and Auschwitz...

Olomouc, Czech Republic

For Part II and the main event for my Model UN trip to the Czech Republic, the team took the Hogwarts Express to a smaller city (population nearly 100,000) in the western part of the country called Olomouc, the capital of the province of Moravia. Okay, so it wasn't quite the Hogwarts Express, but it...

Munich, Germany (and a couple towns we didn’t know to expect)

For the final leg of our post-study abroad trip (minus the Mallorca layover, where we did nothing but lie on the beach for a glorious day), Alayna and I took a 90-minute train from Salzburg to Munich. This train ride from across the Bavarian countryside was the sort of beautifully cliché travel that I had...

Divided History: Berlin, Germany

After studying abroad in Spain for a semester, my friend Alayna and I planned to stay in Europe two weeks after to travel. We deliberated where we should go during the first couple months of studying abroad and decided upon Germany and Austria. Originally, we considered adding more cities in Germany and Austria plus in...

Granada, Spain: Land of the Moors

This blog post is the first since my revival of Adventures of a Traveler's Heart for my New Year's Eve resolution. My first goal is to finish writing about the trips I took while studying abroad in 2015, when I put blogging on hiatus towards the end of the semester as I attempted to soak...

Adventures in Portugal

A couple weeks ago (yes, I’m still behind on blogging my adventures, I know), Semana Santa took Sevilla by storm, which meant spring break #1 for us. Yes, we have two spring breaks; it’s kind of wonderful. TCU students went all over for break, but Alayna and I decided to slow down a bit and vacation...

Cultural Fusion: Moorish Influence in Spain

  One of my professors at UPO describes Spain as an encrucijada, a crossroads where cultural influences from the Mediterranean, Africa, and Europe collide. To me, one of the most interesting influences is that of the Islamic Conquest  (711-1492) of what is today Spain. This history actually inspired my senior thesis project, which examines the...

Toledo, Spain: Off the Beaten Track

My family has been bugging me to write about my most recent trip for a couple weeks, but mid-terms studying and a lot of reading for my literature class kept me more than occupied. At long last mid-terms are complete! 5 tests, 4 of which were in Spanish and all of which were straight memorization, opposite of...

Odds and Ends

This weekend I took a break from traveling so I could enjoy spending time in my host city. There is so much to see in Sevilla, and I love discovering new things about my Spanish home every day. Here are a few of the fun, random, crazy, weird, exciting things I’ve encountered recently: Remember when...

Córdoba: Lessons in Train Travel, the Inevitability of Getting Lost, and the Kindness of Spaniards

Thursday afternoon, two of my roommates, Alayna and Courtney, and I decided that we wanted to take a day trip this weekend after all, despite our original plan of using this weekend to get settled with school, rest from an exhausting two days of classes (which isn’t that bad, except that operating completely in a...